Nary a week goes by without a new fad diet limiting or directing the intake of sugars, fats or proteins — or a combination of any or all three. So it’s rather interesting that a study in the March issue of the Journal of Lipid Research seems to indicate that a glycoprotein known to be involved with promoting growth of muscle mass may have an unexpected relationship with brown adipose tissue, more commonly known as brown fat.

The apparent dichotomy between inherited erythromelalgia mutations affecting activation and paroxysmal extreme pain disorder mutations affecting inactivation of the sodium channels recently has been challenged after the characterization of a new mutation of the SCN9A gene published in The Journal of Biological Chemistry.

Learning is complicated business. But typical research studies into the molecular basis of learning and memory measure only one or a few proteins. In a study just reported in the journal Molecular & Cellular Proteomics, researchers cast a wider net and looked at 80 proteins in the brain of mice.